Re: play-sound-file & esd

[Jan Djärv]

Richard Stallman skrev:
>       Also, I seem to recall that esd will be 
>     replaced with GStreamer in the future, so making Emacs use esd may not be 
>     worth the effort.
>
> How near in the future?

I guess that is like knowing the answer to "When will Emacs 22.0 be released?" 
:-).  Seriously though, I don't follow Gnome development that much.  But the 
developer documents already says you should use GStreamer for multimedia 
(http://developer.gnome.org/doc/guides/platform-overview/platform-overview.html#multimedia).

It may be that esd will be kept for older apps and GStreamer plays sound 
through esd.

Another issue is the sound drivers in the kernel.  The old OSS drivers does 
not allow more than one open to the sound device, but the newer ALSA drivers 
do.  The new ALSA drivers are default in the Linux kernel now, so the original 
problem does not occur if you are using ALSA drivers.

Then there is the workaround to run emacs through esddsp:

% esddsp emacs

I don't have the original problem on my machine (I have ALSA drivers) so I 
don't know if it solves the original problem, but it should.

If we still are going to play sound with esd, may I suggest just execing 
esdplay with the file name?

        Jan D.